Child Abuse

It is a fact that the U.S.’s Child Abuse is the worst in First World.  “More than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members in the last 10 years, nearly four times the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A BBC investigation finds that the United States has the worst child-abuse record of all the industrialized nations. Every week, 66 children under 15 die from physical abuse or neglect in the First World, 27 of them in the U.S. Experts say teen pregnancy, high-school dropout rates, violent crime, imprisonment, and poverty are generally much higher in the United States.”

It is also a fact that the U.S. is the most religious country in the First World.  According to recent surveys on religion, 83 percent of Americans claim to belong to a religious denomination. How can these two facts simultaneously exist in the same country? Read on. I found this excerpt at Alternet.org on November 8, 2011:  

“There is a brutal movement in America that legitimizes child abuse in the name of God. Two stories recently converged to make us pay attention. Last week, a video went viral of a Texas judge brutally whipping his disabled daughter. And on Monday, the New York Times published a story about child deaths in homes that have embraced the teachings of To Train Up a Child, a book by Christian preacher Michael Pearl that advocates using a switch on children as young as six months old.”  As the Times illustrates -- "Preaching Virtue of Spanking, Even as Deaths Fuel Debate" -- the books of Michael Pearl and his wife Debi have been found in the homes where several children were killed.” 

His book has sold in the millions. Why? Mr. Pearl has no formal training in child psychology or any other formal discipline having to do with raising children. 

The book’s title, “To Train Up a Child” is the first clue to this author’s ignorance. Children are not “trained up”. There are several stages of cognitive development that a child goes through naturally. Knowing about and providing the proper environment for each stage is the way to raise children into healthy productive adulthood.

I can find no religious justification for willingly inflicting pain on an innocent six-month old infant.  In fact, it should be quite the opposite.  Religions teach tolerance, love and compassion.

It’s no secret that there are about as many interpretations of ancient religious texts as there are interpreters. It’s also a fact that in the hands of evil people, ancient religious texts can be perverted.

Recognizing and calling something a perversion should not be done casually. It’s a serious charge. So we need to establish a baseline from which to proceed. Paradoxically, the baseline I use comes from the atheist author, Sam Harris in his book, The Moral Landscape.

He gives us a very important question to consider:”If the basic intention of human morality is human flourishing, (i.e., the well being of humankind) can we not determine if a religious belief, does in fact, lead in that direction? More precisely, mustn’t we insist that this be the case? And if we do, don’t we now have the criteria to decide what is a valid or invalid belief system with or without a religious context? I think we do.” 

This from the article “Spanking and the Making of a Violent Society” by Murray A. Straus in the Journal of American Pediatrics, “The United States (US) is the most violent of the advanced industrial societies. The current US homicide rate of 8.5 per 100 000 is three times the Canadian rate of 2.3 per 100 000, and about eight times the rate of Western European countries.”

That we are the most violent society in the First World is bad enough. But that we justify it on religious beliefs is simply incomprehensible.

Robert DeFilippis